The structure of UNIDEE - University of Ideas is articulated through three types of activities investigating the relationship between art and public sphere:

Weekly residential modules taking place at Cittadellarte, open to students (who can gain ECTS credits), professionals, activists as well as members of society. They are held by mentors who are experts on the three broad thematic areas chosen each year and examined in depth through participatory practices and a multidisciplinary approach.

Weekly residential modules at Cittadellarte: a programme of seminars and laboratories open to students, professionals, social entrepreneur, activists and members of society, developed following a participatory teaching format, based on collective debates and knowledge exchange between mentor and participants. The modules draw some of their core case studies from Geographies of Change, a participatory online archive collecting and interlinking organisations active in the fields of governance and policy-making, alternative economic models, urban systems, environment, education and communication.

Mentors are often former UNIDEE residents, participants to visible projectand to ARTInRETI platforms, ambassadors for Third Paradise, Cittadellarte’s current and past associates. Amongst the new collaborators, scholars and researchers, curators, cultural operators, agents of change within specific territorial realms.

Aimed at delving into three broad thematic areas, which represent the first lemmas for the construction of a Triennal (2015-2017) Shared Collective Vocabulary of Ideas on Cittadellarte’s Art and Social Responsible Transformation, developed across UNIDEE - University of Ideas’ educational programme. This Vocabulary intends to make available the theoretical and project materials used by the mentors and the speakers, and produced by the participants throughout the weekly modules.

Residency programmes at Cittadellarte for international artists, organised in collaboration with institutional partners, e.g. RESO’ network, A. M. QattanFoundation (Palestine), Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation (India), aiming at educating and producing. During their stay at Cittadellarte the artists are accompanied along an educational path based on an in-depth analysis of specific issues in relation to a responsible social transformation. A flexible programme encompassing debate series, meetings with curators, artists and social entrepreneurs, experts’ studio visits, conferences with guests, visits to exhibitions and places relevant to the themes discussed, etc., will be the companion to this residential journey. In terms of production, the residency aims at facilitating the creation of new projects for exhibitions, events, public debates, publications etc.

Connective Residency at Cittadellarte: launched in 2015, this residency programme of six months is open to Italian and international artists and collectives interested in exploring and expanding the themes of social responsible transformation, selected by direct invitation as well as via open call. The aim is to establish active “connections” between the resident artists’ own practices and the content and dynamics brought forth by the weekly residential modules and all relevant project activities developed within Cittadellarte.

Here are plates with no appetite. And wedding rings, but the requited love has been gone now for some three hundred years. Here’s a fan – where is the maiden’s blush? Here are swords – where is the ire? Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour. Since eternity was out of stock, ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead. (…) The crown has outlasted the head. The hand has lost out to the glove. The right shoe has defeated the foot. As for me, I am still alive, you see. The battle with my dress still rages on. It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly! Determined to keep living when I’m gone!Wislawa Szimborska, Museum, 1962

How, and on which premisses can we imagine a “post-colonial museum” or an “affective archive”? This contemporary entanglement will be explored through an analysis of the relationship between anthropology and contemporary arts, since the experience of Ethnographic Surrealism in the 1930’s and through the idea of “the artist as ethnographer” (Hal Foster). Rethinking the current relationship between anthropology and contemporary arts from different points of view, we will take into account artworks, performances, curatorial processes in contemporary art exhibitions and/or ethnographic museums, actions inside and outside the museum, experimentations on the construction of othered archives (affective or diasporic archives). The aim is to unmask the assumptions beneath our cultural understanding of key concepts like museum, archive, modernity, linked to a precise and not universal ideas of time, space, identity.

How to turn a museum from a temple for the conservation of Archives, History, Nation, Cultures as essential categories, into a site where to activate dynamics, trying to transform it into a critical, radically self-reflective space? Such transformation calls for an ethical stance – the museum as a cultural form – which is, in turn, extremely useful in building imagined communities. The challenge is to experiment with new methodologies, by conceiving these communities in a transnational, intercultural and transdisciplinary way.

The module attempts to envision the idea of a post-colonial museum yet to come – which might no longer be a “museum” – as a site where the strategies and processes of memory creation are strongly affective. A site activating the bodies and agency of its spectators, beyond co-action; a porous and strongly political space, an experimental laboratory for new forms of citizenship, for a different “community to come”.

SCHEDULE

June 15thmorningGuided tour to Cittadellarte, including the Pistoletto, Arte Povera collections and temporary exhibitions (curated by Luca Furlan) afternoonWorkshop presentation and group presentation Anthropology and Contemporary Art from Ethnographic Surrealism to the present (Case study: The Museum of European Normality) Collective discussion Participant presentations

June 16thmorningFor a contemporary ethnographic museum: strategies of displaying in relation with contemporary art (Case study: The Ethnographic Museum of Neuchâtel, analysis of two exhibitions) afternoonPresentation of actions inside the Ethnographic Museum Pigorini in Rome (Crossing Bodies and Impression d’Afrique) Collective discussion

Giulia Grechi holds a PhD in Theory and social research at the University La Sapienza (Rome, Italy). She was a research fellow at “L’Orientale” (Naples) since January 2015, as a member of the EU Project “MeLa - European Museums in the Age of Migrations”, where she worked on the relation between museums, curatorial practices, anthropology and contemporary art. Her research interests include cultural anthropology, cultural and post-colonial studies, museography, contemporary art, embodiment and emotions as a field of knowledge’s production. She teaches Photography – social communication at the Fine Arts School of Brera (Milan, Italy), Sociology of cultural processes at the European Institute of Design (IED) in Rome, and Cultural Antropology at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. She is editor-in-chief of the on-line journal roots§routes – research on visual culture. She is a member of Routes Agency - Cura of contemporary arts, a team of independent curators based in Rome.

GUESTFiamma Montezemolo is both a Cultural Anthropologist (PhD University Orientale of Naples) and an artist (MFA San Francisco Art Institute). She has taught for many years in Mexico, Italy and USA and she is currently teaching at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. As an established scholar in border and urban studies, she has patiently designed rigorous and long-term ethnographic-artistic interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border. She is widely published and the author of two monographs: on Zapatismo and on Chicano/a politics of representation, as well as co-author (with Rene’ Peralta and Heriberto Yepez) of Here is Tijuana (Blackdog Publishing, London, 2006) and co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Tijuana Dreaming, Life and Art at the Global border (Duke Press, 2012). As an artist she situates her work as a critical extension and overcoming of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. She works with various media, including installation, cartography, video, digital photography, industrial materials, performance, archival documents, and ethnography. Her art and video work has been exhibited, among other places, in New York, San Francisco, San Diego, New Orleans, Dublin, Rome, Mexico City, Tijuana, Morelia, Montreal, Montenegro, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles.